The Washington Post reported yesterday, based on seven current and former U.S. officials, that the Navy is seriously evaluating a redesign of its next-generation Ford-class aircraft carriers — not for any operational, tactical, or safety reason, but because Trump doesn’t like how they look.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY BEING CONSIDERED
The specific change under review: moving the carrier’s “island” — the multistory command tower that houses the bridge and flight-control operations — from its current position near the rear of the ship forward, toward the middle, so the ships more closely resemble older, mid-20th-century carrier designs. Officials told the Post the change would cost billions of dollars and worsen an already chronic pattern of construction delays — the lead Ford-class carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, took 17 years to build. And it wouldn’t be a cosmetic-only tradeoff: moving the island to the middle of the ship would eliminate three concrete operational benefits documented by the Post’s sourcing — additional flight-deck parking space, faster aircraft launch sequencing, and reduced turbulence risk during landings. In plain terms: the Navy is being asked to seriously study spending billions of dollars and adding years of delay to make the ships less efficient at their actual job, because the current arrangement doesn’t match the president’s aesthetic preference.
THIS ISN’T A ONE-OFF — IT’S A STATED PHILOSOPHY
Trump has been explicit and consistent about this for years. Visiting a shipyard working on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate back in 2020, he personally intervened in the design, reportedly saying: “That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful.” More recently, describing his objection to modern stealth-oriented hull designs directly: “I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do. I’m a very aesthetic person and I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically. They say, ‘Oh, it’s stealth.’ I say that’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.” Announcing the new “Trump-class” Defiant-series battleships in December, he said outright: “The Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.” This same national security memorandum reportedly also directs the Navy to develop a plan reverting future carriers to older, steam-powered catapult systems — a second major design reversal driven by the same underlying preference for how ships from an earlier naval era looked and operated.
THE COMPARISON THAT MAKES THIS UNAVOIDABLE
We’ve already documented, across two prior pieces in this newsletter, exactly what’s happening on an actual, currently deployed U.S. aircraft carrier right now: the USS Abraham Lincoln, more than 265 days into a deployment originally scheduled for seven months, with sailors reporting food shortages so severe one described a dinner of half a cup of rice and two tortillas, moldy showers with no hot water, broken toilets, and multiple reported attempts by sailors to jump overboard. When directly asked whether that deployment had gone on too long, Trump’s answer, verbatim, was: “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.”
A Simple Justice legal-commentary blog put the juxtaposition about as sharply as it can be stated: this is happening “when the crew of the USS Lincoln is struggling to deal with the problems with food, sanitation and mental health from an excessive deployment and Trump denies that these very real problems even exist” — while the same commander-in-chief is simultaneously directing billions of dollars in study and redesign work toward making future carriers look more like they did eighty years ago.
WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE SHIP-DESIGN DETAILS
This connects directly to the pattern already documented across this newsletter’s coverage of the $1.5 trillion Golden Dome missile shield nobody can independently audit, the “Golden Fleet” warships and no-bid icebreaker contracts, and the sons’ billions in defense-adjacent contracts: a defense budget where genuinely enormous sums move toward projects justified by prestige, symbolism, and presidential preference, layered directly on top of a military branch whose actual deployed personnel are documented, right now, going without adequate food and hygiene supplies on a deployment that’s already broken length records. The Navy isn’t choosing between “beautiful ships” and “well-supplied sailors” in some abstract budgetary sense — both draw from the same finite pool of taxpayer dollars and institutional attention, and the administration’s own public statements make unmistakably clear which one currently has the president’s genuine, sustained personal focus.